Former senator and president of French Polynesia Gaston Flosse was acquitted on Tuesday, December 5, by the Paris Court of Appeal, after being sentenced at first instance to six months in prison for incomplete or false declaration of assets . The reasons of the court of appeal were not immediately communicated.
Aged 92, Mr. Flosse, Secretary of State for the South Pacific under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, was prosecuted for having failed to declare a substantial part of his assets to the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life (HATVP) in his end of term declaration of November 12, 2014.
Targeted were Mr. Flosse’s shares in a real estate company (SCI) for an amount of 990,000 euros, the balance of a retirement savings account of 221,000 euros, 138 paintings estimated at a total of 240,000 euros and a sum of 125,000 euros that he would have received for a claim.
A six-month prison sentence
At first instance, on October 13, 2021, the criminal court found him guilty and handed down a sentence of six months’ imprisonment, convertible into home detention with an electronic bracelet, and a fine of 45,000 euros. The court withheld all the sums except that of 125,000 euros, considering that it had not been established that it had been concealed.
Mr. Flosse has been implicated in numerous legal cases. In the most recent decisions concerning him, the Papeete criminal court sentenced him at the end of September 2022 to nine months of suspended imprisonment, a fine of 8,300 euros and an ineligibility sentence of five years, for forgery and improper registration on an electoral list. He appealed.
In January 2022, he was definitively sentenced for breach of trust and misappropriation of public property to two years’ suspended imprisonment, a fine of 83,000 euros, as well as five years of ineligibility.